Chapter 4 Arabic in Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey Stephan Procházka University of Vienna This chapter covers the Arabic dialects spoken in the region stretching from the Turkish province of Mersin in the west to Iraq in the east, including Lebanon and Syria. The area is characterized by a high degree of linguistic diversity, and for about two and a half millennia Arabic has come into contact with various other Semitic languages, as well as with Indo-European languages and Turkish. Bilin- gualism, particularly with Aramaic, Kurdish, and Turkish, has resulted in numer- ous contact-induced changes in all realms of grammar, including morphology and syntax. 1 Current state and historical development The region discussed in this chapter is linguistically extremely heterogeneous: in it three different Arabic dialect groups, plus several other languages, are spo- ken. The two main Arabic dialect groups are Syrian and Iraqi, the distribution of which does not exactly correspond to the political boundaries of those two countries. Syrian-type dialects are also spoken in Lebanon, in three provinces of southern Turkey (Mersin, Adana,1 Hatay), and in one village on Cyprus (cf. Walter, this volume). In Iraq, Arabic is mainly spoken in Mesopotamia proper, whereas considerable parts of the mountainous parts of the country are Kurdish- speaking. Arabic dialects which are very akin to the Iraqi ones extend into north- eastern Syria and southeastern Anatolia (for the latter see Akkuş, this volume). These two groups are geographically divided by a third dialect group, which ar- rived in the region with an originally (semi-) nomadic population from northern 1The dialects spoken in Mersin and Adana provinces will henceforth referred to as Cilician Arabic. Stephan Procházka. 2020. Arabic in Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey. In Christopher Lucas & Stefano Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced change, 83–114. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3744507 Stephan Procházka Arabia. Today, this variety preponderates in all villages and most towns between the eastern outskirts of Aleppo and the right bank of the Tigris, and stretching north into the Turkish province of Şanlıurfa. The total number of native Arabic speakers in the whole region is estimated to be 54 million (see Table 1). The dialects of large urban centers like Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad have become supra-regional prestige varieties that are also used in the media and therefore understood by most inhabitants of the respective countries. The situation is very different in Turkey, where the local Arabic is in sharp decline and public life is exclusively dominated by Turkish. Only recently has the position of Arabic in Turkey been socially enhanced by the influx of more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war that started in 2011.2 Table 1: Speaker populations for dialects of Arabic Country Speakers Syria 17,000,000 Lebanon 6,000,000 Iraq 30,000,000 Turkey 1,000,000 Arabic was spoken in the region long before the advent of Islam (Donner 1981: 95), but became the socially dominant language in the wake of the Muslim con- quests in the seventh century CE. From that time until the end of the tenth century, when Bedouin tribes seized large parts of central and northern Syria, there was probably a continuum of sedentary-type dialects that stretched from Mesopotamia to the northeastern Mediterranean (Procházka 2018: 291). During the Mongol sacking of Iraq in 1258, much of the population was killed or ex- pelled. This resulted in far-reaching demographic and linguistic changes as the original sedentary-type dialects were only able to hold ground in Baghdad and the larger settlements to its north. Further south they persisted only among the non-Muslim population. Most of today’s Iraq was re-populated by people who spoke Bedouin-type dialects (mostly coming from the Arabian Peninsula), which over the centuries have heavily influenced the speech of even most large cities (Holes 2007). Very similar dialects are spoken further south and in the Iranian province of Khuzestan (see Leitner, this volume). The foundation of nation states 2See UNHCR figures at https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113. 84 4 Arabic in Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey after World War One caused a significant decrease in contact between thediffer- ent dialect groups and an almost complete isolation of the Arabic dialects spoken in Turkey. 2 Contact languages During its two-and-a-half-millennia presence in the region, Arabic has come into contact with many languages, both Semitic and non-Semitic. Those most rele- vant for the topic will be treated in more detail below (for Syria, see also Barbot 1961: 175–177). Akkadian was spoken in southern Iraq until about the turn of the eras, i.e. the first century CE.3 Greek was the language of administration in Greater Syria until the Arab conquest (Magidow 2013: 185–187) and continued to play a role for Orthodox Christians.4 During Crusader times, Arabic speak- ers in Syria came into contact with various medieval European languages; and along the Mediterranean coast the so-called Lingua Franca (see Nolan, this vol- ume) was an important source for the spread of particularly nautical vocabulary for many centuries (Kahane et al. 1958). Since the nineteenth century, locally re- stricted contacts between Arabic and Armenian and Circassian have existed in parts of Syria and Lebanon. 2.1 Aramaic Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language and thus structurally very similar to Arabic. Different varieties of Aramaic were the main language in Syria andIraq from the middle of the first millennium BCE and it can be assumed that some contact with Arabic existed even at that time. From the first century CE onwards, the southern fringes of the Fertile Crescent became largely Arabic-dominant and there was significant bilingualism with Aramaic, particularly in the towns along the edge of the steppe, such as Petra, Palmyra, Hatra, and al-Ḥīra (Procházka 2018: 260–262). Though after the Muslim conquests Arabic eventually became thema- jority language, it did not oust Aramaic very quickly: the historical sources sug- gest that Aramaic dominated in the larger towns and the mountainous regions of Syria and Lebanon for a long time. In Iraq, by contrast, the massive influx of Arabs into the cities fostered their rapid Arabization, while Aramaic continued to be spoken in the countryside (Magidow 2013: 184; 188). But over the centuries, 3For Akkadian lexical influence on Arabic, see Holes (2002) and Krebernik (2008). 4The enormous influence of Modern Greek on the Arabic spoken in the Kormakiti village of Cyprus is discussed by Walter (this volume). For a detailed study, see also Borg (1985). 85 Stephan Procházka the diverse Aramaic dialects became marginalized and, with very few exceptions, were finally relegated to non-Muslim religious minorities, particularly Christians and Jews, in peripheral regions like Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon Moun- tains, where Aramaic was prevalent until the eighteenth century (Retsö 2011). Western Aramaic is still spoken in three Syrian villages, the best known of which is Maaloula.5 There also remain speakers of Neo-Aramaic in northern Iraq.6 It is hard to establish the degree of bilingualism in the past, but it can be as- sumed that it was mostly Aramaic L1 speakers who had a command of Arabic and not vice versa. In the present time, nearly all remaining Aramaic speakers in Syria are fluent in Arabic. In Iraq this is mainly true of those living in theplain just north of Mosul (Arnold & Behnstedt 1993; Coghill 2012: 86). The influence of different strata of Aramaic on spoken Arabic is a long debated issue, various scholars rating it from considerable to negligible (Hopkins 1995: 39; Lentin 2018: 199–204). 2.2 Persian and Kurdish For many centuries, Arabic and the two Western Iranian languages Persian and Kurdish have influenced each other on different levels. Persian-speaking com- munities existed in medieval Iraq, and economic and cultural contacts between Mesopotamia and Iran have continued to the present (cf. Gazsi 2011). An impor- tant factor of language contact are the holy shrines of the Imams in Kerbela, Najaf, and other Iraqi cities, which have always attracted tens of thousands of Persian- speaking Shiites every year. Intensive contacts between speakers of Kurdish and Arabic have existed since at least the tenth century, particularly in Northern Iraq, northeast Syria, and southeast Anatolia (see Akkuş, this volume). Until their ex- odus in the early 1950s, the Arabic-speaking Jewish communities which existed in Iraqi Kurdistan usually had a native-like command of Kurdish (Jastrow 1990: 12). Due to the multilingual character of the region, bilingualism in Kurdish and Arabic is still relatively widespread, particularly in urban settings, though with Kurds usually much more fluent in Arabic than the other way around.7 However, for obvious reasons, little linguistic research has been done in Iraq for decades, which makes it impossible to give up-to-date information about the linguistic situation in ethnically-mixed cities like Kirkuk. 5The village heavily suffered from the jihadist occupation of 2013–2014, but after government troops had retaken control over the region, many inhabitants returned and began its recon- struction (cf. the reports collected at http://friendsofmaaloula.de/). 6See Coghill (2012) and http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/nort3241. 7With significant exceptions in some parts of southeast Anatolia; see Akkuş (this volume). 86 4 Arabic in Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey 2.3 Ottoman and Modern Turkish Contacts between spoken Arabic varieties and various Turkic languages existed from the ninth century onwards. These early contacts, however, left hardly any traces in Arabic except for a handful of loanwords. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans established their rule over most Arab lands, including Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.